The influence of phonetic context on the acoustical properties of stops

In American English, stop consonants may be released, unreleased, or deleted (e.g., the phoneme /t/ in “tea,” “basketball,” and “softly,” respectively). The particular acoustical realization is almost obligatory in some environments and highly variable in others. The purpose of our study was to quantify the influence of context, including syllable structure, on the acoustical properties of stop consonants. Or database consisted of some 5200 stops collected from 1000 sentences. Phonemic transcriptions, including lexical stress and syllable markers, were provided and aligned with the speech waveforms. The stops were grouped into categories corresponding to their position within syllables (e.g., syllable‐initial‐singleton, syllable‐final‐affix, etc.) and marked according to their local phonemic context. Segment durations were measured and the stops were classified as released, unreleased, or deleted on the basis of their duration and voice onset time (VOT). In the analysis of these data, including the examin...